The Thirty Names of Night

by Zeyn Joukhadar

  “I don’t dance,” I yell to Sami above the music.

  “Dancing is a myth,” Sami says.

  Sami dips his chest and lifts his hands, and he is not dancing, but trying to fly. He is testing his body in the wind, feeling the weight and breadth of it. My heart is a new bird throwing itself against the space he is taking up. There are no long-legged white girls around us, no pale, over-cologned boys snicker-flirting with the bartender. Instead, all around us, there are brown and Black bodies marked with glow paint and tattoos. There are micro-minis and leather short-shorts and calf-length dresses in pleated faux silk atop unshaven legs. There are bodies with breasts, with thighs, with scars, with canes; wearing high heels, wearing high tops; large bodies, small bodies, bodies that twirl and shake and fill the room. This is not dancing, but a becoming of winged creatures.

  The DJ turns the music down, and the room stills to listen. Even over the bass beat, the sound of the isha’ adhan next door is loud enough to make itself heard. The DJ has lowered the music out of respect, so that the call to prayer becomes part of the music. The room continues to dance as though this is simply another rhythm to move one’s body to. Once, a friend of yours from Marrakesh played us a recording of the adhan from the streets of the old medina. She said it reminded her that, no matter what she was worrying about, life was fleeting, and one day none of the fears that plagued her would matter at all. I always liked that about the adhan: that a sound could both remind me that I was going to die and comfort me with the reminder that I was still alive, that it could remind me of the ways my ancestors touched their foreheads to the earth. That a single sound could tap that ancient place in my bones and make it sing like a plucked string.

  The last time I went to the masjid with you is as alive as though it’s still happening. It is Ashura, and I am fasting. It is a hot day. I put on my abaya, wrap my hijab, walk with you up the stairs to the women’s room. I take off my sandals and set them in the cubby, and inside, the carpet meets my hungry toes. The women burst into the room like eagles, faces bright, their abayat emerald and night-black and pomegranate. Half of the women who greet me look like Teta, like the woman I am supposed to one day become. As-salaamu alaykum, we say to one another as women arrange themselves in rows for prayer, wa alaykum as-salaam. We recite and bow our heads and turn to our angels on either side. Then the day is gone, and we break our fast behind closed doors where teenage girls whip off their hijabs and laugh, sequester themselves from their mothers, tell dirty jokes, oil their fingers with turmeric chicken. Bismillah, we say, and eat until we are full. In those days, as out of place as I felt in the world, I would have dared anyone to tell me we were anything less than our own feast.

  I haven’t prayed since the day they slid you into the earth. Your grave faces a copse of pines that separates the cemetery from the homes of rich families who don’t want to see the dead and the grieving. We buried not a person but a continent that day. We’re made from clay, after all, aren’t we, and underground springs and threads of copper run in our veins. When this country asks me where I’m from, they aren’t asking for the city on my birth certificate, but whose earth is in my blood.

  Then the adhan is over, and I am swimming in the music. I paint the space around me with my body. I think of the last time I used my hands to make something beautiful. As long as my body was not for myself, I stopped allowing myself the luxury of wanting. But here in this space that smells of sweat and sage and cigarette smoke, anything seems possible, even desire. Sami curves his back, his knees, his neck. He is beautiful, and I am still in love with him, and this is not a mistake.

  I bend and untangle and step out of my body, lightening myself into this swollen room where boys like me are arcing and vaulting our unruly bodies, shaking the wet newness from our wings.

  EIGHT / LAILA

  B, I THINK KHALTO Tala might be like me.

  It’s been nearly a month since I last wrote anything in this journal, but I can’t keep my thoughts in my head today. The dawn was cold, one of those chilly April mornings that feels like winter is setting in again. I woke up at dawn to find Khalto Tala missing from our narrow bed. I kicked off the wool blanket and wrapped one of her embroidered shawls around my shoulders, the asymmetrical one—the scissor had slipped off the bias, and Mr. Awad rejected it, so Khalti took it home—and exposed one of my arms to the chill as I shuffled out into the hallway. A few of our neighbors were already awake, humming at the windows into the courtyard between the eastern and western wings of the building. Women tugged on the lines to hang their laundry for the day, and the predawn breeze swayed towels, sheets, and children’s underthings. Imm Faysal next door opened her window to move the stale air, and a faint argument drifted out from the bedroom. On the street, Lower Manhattan was waking. Boys put on their caps and left for their jobs delivering newspapers or selling fruit by pushcart; shop owners walked to the market on Washington Street; neighbors greeted one another from their stoops. Beyond our neighborhood, the horns of Fords and Hillmans pierced the blue shadows as Midtown stretched and grumbled.

  I made my way down the hallway in a pair of my mother’s slippers and took the narrow staircase to the roof. To be a bird, I remember thinking, to be a bird and see the streets from above the iron canyons, to look toward the place where I was born and see the first ray of sun falling across the island of Manhattan. Our building is five stories high, and dawn is the only time I have to myself before Issa goes off to school and the demands of the day begin.

  I’d never explored the tar-papered roof before. That morning, when I pushed open the door, I was greeted by the ceaseless cooing of pigeons. Grit and pebbles dug into the thin soles of my slippers as I propped the door open with a rock, then walked toward the edge of the roof. As my eyes adjusted, shapes emerged from the shadows around me: the silver tubes of exhaust chimneys and the discarded blankets of the people who sometimes sleep up here on warm nights.

  Farther off sat several enormous wooden crates. A lanky figure moved between the boxes, hunched but brisk, a canvas bag in one hand. I crept closer. A key squeaked into a lock, and the bars of one of the cages creaked open. The figure tossed seeds from the canvas bag inside, and as she straightened, the first caress of morning light kissed Khalto Tala’s yellow work apron.

  I called out to her, and she jumped. From inside the row of wooden coops came the fluttering of hundreds of wings. The boxes were dovecotes, at least four wide coops of plywood and mesh chicken wire. As Khalto Tala jumped back, out the pigeons went in a sea of clucking complaints, a fury of gray and white wings, and took to the muddy skies above Washington Street. What a sight! Khalto Tala cried out and covered her face with her arms as the wall of feathers tumbled past her, but soon she was laughing. She brushed her hands on her apron. Seeds lay spilled on the papered rooftop, picked at by the few remaining pigeons.

  It turned out the pigeons weren’t Khalto Tala’s at all. A woman in a white lace kerchief emerged from behind the dovecotes, laughing into a fistful of her apron. She was darker than Khalti, with sharp black eyes and bolts of silver at her temples. I recognized her as the widow Haddad, one of our neighbors who works in a haberdashery, cinching ribbons around the brims of cloches. She lost her husband in the Great War before I was born, and though she has no children, she’s never remarried, opting to live alone ever since. My mother talks about her sometimes when she scrubs my face in the summer with turmeric and lemon, for which I’ve always felt too ashamed to speak to her.

  “Tell me, ya bint,” the widow Haddad said, and her accent was of Jabel, from the mountains. “Have you any experience with racing doves?”

  Khalto Tala laughed and told her to let me be, but I joined the widow Haddad at the roof’s edge. She took a rag and a bucket of water and began to scrub the perches, soiled with the birds’ white waste, and motioned for me to look inside the coops. One pigeon had declined to fly out with the others. He cocked his white head at me and searched me with bright, curious eyes. A cape of black fea
thers gave way to mottled brown-and-white wings, and a ruff of iridescent feathers crowned his neck, the black flashing pink and purple as he moved his head to get a better look. He seemed a strange sort of bird, but I liked him. I held out my hand, and the pigeon dipped his beak into my palm as though expecting a treat.

  The widow Haddad told me to be gentle with the bird, whose name was Khan. She shook a mound of seeds into my hand and went on scrubbing the perches, telling me how, after she came to Amrika after the war, the bird was the only friend she had. The Haddad family has bred pigeons for generations. Their birds are strong flyers, she told me, fast and brave. Khan was the start of her flock in Amrika.

  “You’ll find birds much more agreeable than people,” the widow Haddad said.

  Khalto Tala brushed her hands on her apron and agreed.

  Below us, the street markets were coming to life. Carts of peanuts and carrots were set outside of grocery shops, wool dresses had been hung above the doors of dress shops, and women walked the cobblestones with their market baskets. I held out my hand, and Khan pecked carefully into my palm, taking the seed first with his tongue and then with his beak, as if he were trying to be gentle.

  When I glanced back at Khalto Tala, she was no longer paying attention. She and the widow Haddad stood side by side, not touching, but standing close enough to hear each other breathing. Khalto Tala handed a rag to the widow Haddad, and that’s when I saw it—the brush of Khalti’s fingers on the back of the older woman’s hand, her pinky clasping Khalti’s. They were slow to pull away, each woman humming the same tune.

  * * *

  My mother has a particular candle she burns each night during her evening prayers, after the washing up and mending is done. She brought it with her in our steamer trunk when we left the village, wrapping it up in her tattered socks to conceal it in case the other passengers or the inspectors had sticky hands. It was given to her before we left by a neighbor, one of the oldest women I know of, so old that my mother dressed the bodies of five of her sons and three of her grandchildren who died in the uprisings of my parents’ youth. Now long since widowed, this ancient woman used to walk herself to church every Sunday without fail. My mother never told me the story of the candle, but I’m clever enough, little wing, to understand that the more mourning a person has done, the more they pray. Or so I used to think. When we first arrived here, my mother lit the candle each night like this woman’s gift was the only thing still nursing her faith.

  Tonight, my mother’s holy candle stands unlit.

  The day began without incident. Khalto Tala sent me over to Mr. Shaheen’s dry goods store when it was still dark to pick up a new wick for the oil lamp we used in the back of the shop. We had long ago lost the luxury of buying chocolate or taffy at break time. I was only sent over now when we ran out of paper or ribbon to wrap the packages, or if I was to pick something up for my mother before the shop closed. The steam was rising from the subway grates, bringing with it the smell of train brakes and urine, a smell that will probably always remind me of this city. It began to rain, the clouds threatening a downpour. The shop’s sticky heat and the icy drizzle had uncoiled my braids, and I shivered as I returned from Mr. Shaheen’s with the wick. I passed a subway entrance and fantasized of all the places I’ve heard about from Khalto Tala that I would have rather escaped to in that moment: a jazz show in Harlem, watching a woman in a dapper suit performing at Coney Island, riding a steam-powered merry-go-round in Central Park.

  I shuffled back into the workroom out of the wet, which was when all the trouble started. I had just started sewing Chantilly lace trim onto the straps of a camisole when Khalto Tala came into the workroom and said there was a woman there to see me.

  At first I didn’t believe her. I cracked open the door to peek out onto the floor of the shop, though, and sure enough, there was a white woman standing there, sighing and checking her yellow hair in a pocket mirror. I’d seen her a few times before, usually stepping out of her Rolls-Royce in a ribbon-trimmed hat to peruse the negligee in the shop’s window display. Once, I’d spotted her disappearing into one of the photography shops on Rector where wealthy American women had pictures taken wearing our grandparents’ thobes, dripping with gaudy costume jewelry the photographers found in the pawn shops. She was out of place here on the shop floor, shifting from foot to foot.

  I turned to Khalto Tala, who nudged me out. I may be nearly grown now, but I’m still my mother’s scrawny daughter, and I have a habit of walking so quietly that no one sees me until I startle them. As I approached, the woman didn’t notice. She slid off one of her gloves to run her fingers over the lace sparrows I’d embroidered on a shawl and cooed with satisfaction. Mr. Awad, who was never far away, strode over quick as lightning to tell her about the excellence of the design she’d been admiring, that all our merchandise was made by the finest Syrian craftsmen, that the silk was imported from the Holy Land. The Americans seemed to like us better when we mentioned the Messiah.

  I coughed, and at last the woman turned to appraise me. My face was grimy with sweat. She frowned. She gave me the same look as the other women who frequented the store, the look that made me feel like a baby mouse found in a kitchen cupboard: unusual, but not something she wanted to touch.

  The woman’s name, as it turned out, was Mrs. Theodore, a “patron of the arts,” she called herself. Khalto Tala translated for me: Mrs. Theodore had donated the prize money to the art competition I’d entered.

  Little wing, I won. She had to say it twice before I believed her—in fact, it wasn’t until she told me she’d agreed to spend the afternoon with the winner that I understood she had come to give me my award. From the look on her face, I wasn’t entirely what she’d been expecting.

  Mrs. Theodore handed me a certificate with my name on it and put her gloves back on as though she were ready to leave. Khalto Tala pushed me toward her.

  “Congratulations,” Mrs. Theodore said, “you should be very proud.” She motioned for me to follow.

  Mrs. Theodore’s black Rolls-Royce was parked outside. A man in a suit and white gloves opened the rear passenger door for us. I hesitated, and Mrs. Theodore beckoned me inside. “Hurry up now, girl,” she scolded. I slid myself into the leather seat, my face hot.

  Soon we were zooming away uptown. Mrs. Theodore batted dust from the hem of her dress. “Now I remember why I stopped coming down here,” she said, dabbing her handkerchief at a fleck of soot. “Don’t you people sweep your steps?”

  Mrs. Theodore made a noise between a scoff and a chuckle, and the polite smile froze on my face. Had it been a joke? The space shrank to a tight, airless box. I dropped my eyes to the smooth leather of the back seat with its wooden armrests and silver door handles. I was afraid to touch anything. I tried to smooth the wrinkles in my gray skirt, tucking my ankles into the hem to hide the scuffs on my plain leather shoes. I began to fear Mrs. Theodore would spot the dirt and the stains on my clothes and decide she didn’t want me soiling the leather. I had only ever learned to find my way around Little Syria and Battery Park; I wouldn’t know how to get home from anywhere else.

  Mrs. Theodore pulled off her gloves and thumped them in her lap. Her smile reappeared, brisk. She adjusted her hair in a pocket mirror, and I had the strange sense that I was standing just out of frame in a movie about this woman’s life. I admitted to myself that she was very beautiful, and she had the childlike air of a person who believes themselves to be likable and just. She told me she had big plans for our afternoon together, that I would see real culture, though I wasn’t sure what she meant by that, and that I would see the most beautiful bird art there was.

  I told her I liked to draw birds very much, and that one day I wanted to be a painter. Mrs. Theodore gave a faltering smile and then burst out laughing as though I’d told her I wanted to go to the moon. “What an odd little girl,” she said with her hand to her mouth. When she spoke, her crisp English made me feel like I’d walked out onto a frozen pond, waiting to fall.
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  Mrs. Theodore leaned forward to open the glass partition, gave the driver a name, and then shut it with a click. Soon our car pulled up to a curb in a section of Midtown I had never seen, a wide plaza filled with pale businessmen in dark suits. The driver opened the door for us. I tumbled out after Mrs. Theodore as she fluffed her hair and adjusted her fur collar.

  I followed Mrs. Theodore through a set of glass doors trimmed in black marble. Inside was a low-ceilinged hall with sleek wooden paneling and sculpted lamps. The room felt close, but the warm light kept it from feeling stifling. Americans in rich attire, mostly men, were seated in rows, watching another man at the front of the room gesture to a large print on a wooden stand. A woman arranged the page on the stand with gloved hands as he spoke.

  Mrs. Theodore took a seat and motioned for me to stand beside her on the nearest aisle. From this distance, I could make out the rust-colored feathers of the red-tailed hawk in the print, the stripes on its tail feathers minutely etched.

  Apparently Mrs. Theodore, too, had a passion for birds as well as for art. She described to me the technique of copperplate etching, where a picture is drawn onto a sheet of copper with a metal tool and used to print many copies. Audubon, in whose honor the competition I’d won had been held, had hand-painted his prints with watercolor after etching them. To tell you the truth, little wing, I’d never seen anything so fine in all my life. But though I itched to move and get a better look, Mrs. Theodore wouldn’t stop talking. She droned on about the life of the artist, from his birth in the French colony of Haiti to his death here in Manhattan. She seemed to think this was an end worthy of admiration in itself. She told me some of Audubon’s birds, like the dodo, were extinct by now. I asked Mrs. Theodore why the birds’ necks and backs were twisted into impossible silhouettes. Mrs. Theodore blinked and said, “He did shoot them, dear.”